How To Get Animoji-Like Animated Emoji On Any Android, iOS Device

Every new flagship smartphone comes with a gimmick nowadays. For Apple’s tenth-anniversary iPhone, that gimmick is the Animoji feature, which makes use of the phone’s new TrueDepth module to map the user’s face and project every lip movement and expression onto a 3D animated emoji. iPhone X users can create recordings featuring these animated avatars and share them with their friends.

In the first few days following the widespread availability of the device, social media was abuzz with praises for the new feature. It even managed to give birth to a new “Animoji Karaoke” trend that saw countless videos of the animated emoji lip-syncing popular songs. If you’ve been feeling left out of the craze after deciding to stick with an older iPhone or Android device, you might be pleased to know that there is a way you can hop aboard the Animoji train without having to spend a thousand bucks on the iPhone X.

While you won’t be able to get Apple’s offering on any iOS or Android device, there are alternatives available as part of free apps on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

MRRMRR

The first of the two apps we are going to feature here goes so far as to entirely clone Apple’s Animoji, offering the exact same collection of characters as the latter. MRRMRR’s animated emoji are several notches below Apple’s, with the detail and animation quality on the former having been severely toned down, most likely to avoid performance degradation on older devices. In fact, the app’s animated emoji have a hard time mirroring any complex lip movements or expressions, which makes it more suitable for still images or simpler videos.

The app originally featured filters, masks, and effects similar to those offered by Snapchat. The recently added Animoji knockoffs can be found under the new Emoji tab.

FaceRig

FaceRig has been offering what it calls “digital cosplay” for awhile on Windows, Android, and iOS, with its mobile apps available for free. The apps let you choose from 14 backgrounds and more than 40 3D characters with amazing detail. While certainly more capable than MRRMRR’s animated emoji, FaceRig’s avatars don’t reproduce expressions as consistently as Apple’s Animoji, most likely because they don’t have the TrueDepth module’s sensors helping them track the user’s face. The app might just make up for that, however, what with greater variety on offer along with the option to create custom “Live2D” avatars of your own.

I'm an engineer, blogger, and graphic designer who loves creating and experimenting with different forms of online content when he's not looking for a mix of inspiration and escape in PC gaming, comic books and anime. You can find me on Twitter and Google+.